Yoenis Cespedes has a twin.
Not an absolutely identical twin, mind you. Just a pretty close one. Cespedes and his twin were born fourteen years apart, which complicates things.
Here are two sample seasons, to get at what we're talking about:
PA
|
H
|
2B
|
3B
|
HR
|
BB
|
BA
|
OBP
|
SLG
|
540
|
142
|
25
|
5
|
23
|
43
|
.292
|
.356
|
.505
|
536
|
153
|
23
|
6
|
26
|
33
|
.286
|
.328
|
.496
|
That first line is Cespedes’ first year in the majors. The second year is one in the career of our mystery player. Their ages, in these single seasons, don’t match up exactly, but they’re not too far off, either. Cespedes was twenty-six, while the other guy was twenty-four-and-a-half.
We’ll come back to these two.
* * *
I don’t know how many players have twins, whether it is relatively common or rare.
I do know that the idea of ‘twins’ or ‘parallels’ sometimes trickles into how we talk about baseball. Mike Trout is a good example: we talk about Mike Trout as being ‘the next Mantle.’ It’s a way of organizing the world, by parsing it into smaller sections. When we think of a player, we invariably think of whatever player seems like that player. I can’t think about Jose Fernandez without thinking about thinking about Pedro Martinez. It’s not a numbers things, just a sense: Pedro combined genius and competitiveness with a kind of joy, which Jose Fernandez shares.
Anyway, we can say that statistical identical twins are pretty hard to find. There are three factors that make them hard to find.
Factor One is the number of variables considered.
Take Nick Castellanos. Last year, the Tigers 3B posted an on-base percentage of .308, hitting 15 dingers. Can we find a twin for him?
Of course we can. We don’t have to look that far….we can just use other players from 2015.
Name
|
HR
|
OBP
|
Asdrubal Cabrera
|
15
|
.315
|
Marcus Semien
|
15
|
.310
|
Derek Norris
|
14
|
.305
|
Nick Castellanos
|
15
|
.303
|
Brett Lawrie
|
16
|
.299
|
Wilmer Flores
|
16
|
.295
|
Michael Taylor
|
14
|
.282
|
We can find seven players who were within 1 HR of Castellanos, while posting a comparable on-base percentage. Pretty easy.
But if we add another variable, we lose a few siblings. Let’s add stolen bases:
Name
|
HR
|
OBP
|
SB
|
Asdrubal Cabrera
|
15
|
0.315
|
6
|
Marcus Semien
|
15
|
0.31
|
11
|
Derek Norris
|
14
|
0.305
|
4
|
Nick Castellanos
|
15
|
0.303
|
0
|
Brett Lawrie
|
16
|
0.299
|
5
|
Wilmer Flores
|
16
|
0.295
|
0
|
Michael Taylor
|
14
|
0.282
|
16
|
Our Man Nick stole zero bases in 2015. He is obviously not a twin to Michael Taylor or Marcus Semien.
If we add position to the list, it becomes even smaller. Asdrubal Cabrera is a middle-infielder. Norris and Flores are catchers. The only guy who plays the same position (3B) as Castellanos is Brett Lawrie.
And they don’t play third base the same way. Brett Lawrie is a brilliant defensive player: he is good enough to make starts at second base. Castellanos isn’t anything like Lawrie: Nick is a poor defensive player. If he is playing in the majors in five years, he will be almost certainly be a first-baseman or a DH.
So the amount of variables matters. That’s one factor.
Another factor is talent. It is very easy to find a match for Castellanos’ .308/15 line. It is much harder to find someone close to Bryce Harper’s 2015 batting line. Harper posted a .460 on-base percentage and hit 42 homers. Who is that like?
No one from 2015. Joey Votto comes close on on-base percentage. Mike Trout is close on homers.
A few guys do show up as parallels, if you look though all seasons of baseball history:
Year
|
Name
|
HR
|
OBP
|
1996
|
Gary Sheffield
|
42
|
.465
|
2000
|
Todd Helton
|
42
|
.463
|
1996
|
Barry Bonds
|
42
|
.461
|
2015
|
Bryce Harper
|
42
|
.460
|
1922
|
R. Hornsby
|
42
|
.459
|
1999
|
Jeff Bagwell
|
42
|
.454
|
1951
|
Ralph Kiner
|
42
|
.452
|
We found some twins to Harper, but we had to go back a few years. And, again, we’re just looking at two numbers. If we cross-checked this list with speed, and position, and attention-to-hair, and dugout fisticuffs, the list would shrink. The better the year, the tougher it is to find parallels.
The last factor is time: the longer the frame we’re looking at, the more differences start to creep in.
Castellanos and Semien and Asdrubal Cabrera and Brett Lawrie were pretty similar in their on-base averages and homers in 2015, but it’s unlikely that they were similar in 2014. It’s unlikely that they will perform similarly going forward. If you looked at three years of Castellanos’ career, you’d have a tougher time finding parallel players in his era.
So we can say that ‘twining’ has an inverse relationship to a) the number of factors considered, b) the quality of performance, and c) duration of time.
It’s not difficult to take an average player having an average year and find other players who had similar years. It’s more difficult to find matches of good players, and it is even more difficult to find comparisons over multiple years. And the most factors you consider, the less the players are going to parallel, or 'twin.'
Which is what makes the existence of a Cespedes twin so weird.
Because Cespedes is a good player: he isn’t a mediocre player like Castellanos. And it’s weird because the parallel isn’t a one-year parallel: Cespedes matches his twin for the entirety of his career. And the parallels don’t exist in a few places: these two players match in everything...their style of play and skills and stats match across the board. They are identical twins.
* * *
Yoenis Cespedes’ twin is Raul Mondesi.
We’ll get to the numbers eventually. But before we do, I want to note some of the non-numeric parallels between the two of them. First is handedness: both players are right/right….they bat and throw right-handed.
They are similarly sized: Cespedes is listed at 5’10", 210 pounds. Mondesi is listed at 5’11", 202. They have the same body-type, essentially: both men have thin core frames, with considerable muscle.
Neither one passes my spell-check. Mondesi and Cespedes both get underlined. Raul gets a pass, but not Yoenis. This probably doesn’t matter, but I’m mentioning it anyway.
They are both outfielders. Mondesi was a Gold-Glove winning outfielder whose strong throwing arm made up for a pretty high number of errors. He was a right-fielder who could be stretched to play center.
Cespedes has the exact same skill set, though he’s mostly played in left field, with some trials in center. Cespedes is famous for having a terrific arm, which makes up for his errors. Cespedes has a Gold Glove.
Both players are reasonably good baserunner, but neither one would ever win a footrace with Billy Hamilton. Mondesi stole more bases than Cespedes….that’s the biggest gap between them, by far. Let’s get some numbers in:
Player
|
SB
|
CS
|
BsR
|
Cespedes
|
37
|
18
|
9.7
|
Mondesi
|
106
|
40
|
3.6
|
While Mondesi stole more bases than Cespedes, the Mets outfielder rates as the slightly better baserunner, at least by Fangraph’s version of base-running runs.
Important note: those numbers are each player’s cumulative stats between ages 26 and 29. Cespedes had a late start, so we’re comparing his career against Mondesi’s numbers at the same age. That’s what all of the numbers reflect: each player’s Age-26 thru Age-29 seasons.
Before we get into numbers, one more surface parallel. Raul Mondesi won the Rookie-of-the-Year. Cespedes had an extremely strong rookie year, but actually came in second in the ROY vote. Some guy named Mike Trout won the award over Cespedes….I haven’t looked at the numbers, but I bet the voters got it wrong. Cespedes had a great rookie year. I’ve never heard of the other guy.
Both Mondesi and Cespedes are Latin American players, of course. Islanders. Cespedes was born in Cuba, of course, while Mondesi hails from the Dominican Republic. I don’t know that that matters, but it’s another parallel. It’s another thing they had in common: they were immigrants to the US. Spanish speakers.
One way it could matter is their walk rates. You ever hear that adage applied to Latin players: "You can’t walk off the island"? That holds for both of these players: they do not show as particularly disciplined batters:
Player
|
PA
|
BB
|
K
|
Cespedes
|
2435
|
148
|
508
|
Mondesi
|
2392
|
177
|
424
|
Cespedes walks a little less than his twin, and strikes out a little bit more. The gap is narrowed when you consider league contexts: Cespedes, fourteen years younger than Mondesi, is playing in an era with slightly higher strikeout rates, and slightly lower walk rates.
To understand their offensive contributions within the scoring conditions of their respective leagues, we should check on a few context adjusted metrics. We’ll try Weighted Runs Created (wRC+) and Adjusted On-base Plus Slugging (OPS+):
Player
|
wRC+
|
OPS+
|
Cespedes
|
121
|
122
|
Mondesi
|
118
|
119
|
Almost exactly the same. Cespedes shows as a hair better a hitter than Raul Mondesi.
Taking a step back, let’s look at their raw triple-slash lines:
Player
|
AVG
|
OBP
|
SLG
|
Cespedes
|
.271
|
.319
|
.486
|
Mondesi
|
.279
|
.335
|
.510
|
Again, we have two nearly identical players. Cespedes has a slightly better on-base percentage, but Mondesi has a bit more pop. I’ll remind you that we’re looking at about 2400 plate appearances of performance, which is a pretty sizeable data set.
Here’s their type-of-hit distribution. I initially calculated these as rate stats (the number of doubles, say, per 600 plate appearances), and then I realized that I didn’t have to list them as rate stats to show the similarity:
Player
|
AB
|
Singles
|
Doubles
|
Triples
|
HR
|
Cespedes
|
2249
|
358
|
124
|
21
|
106
|
Mondesi
|
2185
|
357
|
119
|
17
|
117
|
Just by counting them, they’re identical.
I’ve avoided using WAR thus far, but WAR has Cespedes as being a little more valuable than his twin. It helps that Cespedes posted the best season of his career in 2015:
Player
|
Games
|
WAR
|
WAR/162
|
Cespedes
|
575
|
15.4
|
4.3
|
Mondesi
|
562
|
12.4
|
3.6
|
They’re identical twins. I’m sort of astonished by this, though I don’t know if I should be.
* * *
We could say that this information tells us that Yoenis Cespedes isn’t a terrific long-term investment. Raul Mondesi was a pretty good player as a young man, but he declined pretty quickly in his thirties. That’s phrasing it nicely: Mondesi’s value fell off a cliff.
Which is what you’d expect of an aging player with low walk rates and an on-base percentage reliant on hard-hit balls, whose defensive and base running value depended on skills that almost always erode in a player’s thirties (arm strength, speed). Mondesi’s power spiked a little bit as he turned the corner, and his walk rate jumped, but the quality of his contact lessened, which caused his batting averages to plummet. His defense and speed declined, and his arm no longer made opposing baserunners nervous. By the time he was thirty-three, Mondesi was a part-time player, platooning for whatever contender was looking for a right-handed bat off the bench. He was out of baseball at thirty-four.
You can’t escape the fact that Cespedes has almost uncannily paralleled Mondesi’s career path. Although it is generally foolish to project one player on the basis of just one other player, it’s pretty rare to find a parallel so similar on all fronts.
But this is assumption ignores one factoid that I haven’t touched on. Cespedes played brilliantly last year, posting numbers that ranked him as one of the top-ten offensive players in baseball. At twenty-nine, Cespedes did not seem like a declining player: he seemed like a player whose abilities were finally reaching their apex.
This is not where Mondesi was in his Age-29 season. After signing a deal with the Blue Jays, Mondesi struggled through his first injury-limited year, playing just 96 games. While Mondesi posted the second-best slugging percentage of his career, his overall performance wasn’t close to the MVP-level performance that Cespedes turned in last year.
Just on the basis of Cespedes’ better performance as a twenty-nine year old, I’d bet that the Mets outfielder is more productive going forward than Raul Mondesi was at the same age. That said, the comparison hints that there are some pretty big red flags about how Yoenis Cespedes’ career is going to unfold going forward, and teams were smart to avoid offering him the five- or six-year deal that most of us were expecting him to get this offseason.
Dave Fleming is a writer living in Wellington, New Zealand. He welcomes comments, questions, and suggestions here and at dfleming198@yahoo.com.